The soldier hotwired a car on the outskirts of Venice, a milky white Lancia, and got Mimi inside before dawn broke. He told her to drive until she reached a garage he had passed on the way in, that he would meet her there, and that if anyone asked she had decided to leave the American/Germans of her own accord. Then he saw her off until the car was out of sight and went to change into civvies.

The soldier hated going undercover. He had to be careful to hide his arm, and his officers had drilled into him that his face was equally noticeable (but why? It wasn't like anyone had ever seen it). He ended up in biker gear that was inconspicuous when paired with a stolen bike, and stuck his combat suit and larger weapons in a rucksack that clung to his back as the motorbike roared out of the city. As the city roads became country ones, he ran over what he knew in his head. Nazis... They had not been in the briefing. What had HYDRA even told him about Nazis?

"HYDRA. The Nazis' deep science division."

The front wheel hit a pothole and the handles of the bike bucked beneath the soldier's hands. His eyes widened and he had to put down a foot to stop himself from going flying off of the road.

He didn't... Nobody had ever told him that. Why would HYDRA tell him that? They were supposed to be Soviet... How the hell did he know that? Why was that sentence, that sliver of information, so familiar to him?

He shook his head and pushed the thought aside. It wasn't important. It didn't matter; what mattered was that his CO got the codes, and whoever was in London did not. The soldier was not told much, but he knew if and when a nuclear strike was going to happen. That would affect even his shadowy operations.

Instead, he thought of Mimi Ivanovna. She hadn't seemed particularly upset by the killing that had happened right in front of her, so she had most likely seen things along those lines before - this, considering her father, was not surprising. But she hadn't been scared of him, either. Perhaps she had read his file, if he even had one - that would explain why she thought she recognised him. And she had thought that he had a name. She had asked.

The low-slung building of mismatched bricks and corrugated iron rose up on the horizon, heralded by the burnt out shells of a dozen cars. The soldier pulled up outside to see Mimi perched on the bonnet of a Beetle, cigarette held daintily between her fingers, showered and freshly clothed and laughing at a joke the grimy mechanic had just made.

"I'm a fast driver," she explained as he walked up, "no need to scowl, I haven't emasculated you. And this lovely man let me borrow his shower. So you took your muzzle off, hm?" She leant forward, until her little ski-slope nose was an inch from his. "Yes, I do know that face... Have you ever been in flicks?"

Bucky pushed her away from him and turned to the mechanic. "Trade?" he asked, jerking his head back at the stolen bike.

"Got an old Maserati in the back, waiting for someone to take her." The mechanic's voice was barely understandable, so thick was his accent. "I'll need more than just a trade, though."

The soldier turned to Mimi, who raised an eyebrow at him. "Yes?"

"You got cash?"

"What's the magic word?" she asked him, taking another drag of her cigarette. The soldier walked to the white car, reached in through the open window, and took a wad of notes out of the purse sat in the passenger seat.

"This enough?" he asked the mechanic, whose eyes lit up. "Good. We were never here."

"Sir, yes sir!"

"You can't just steal my money!" Mimi protested, matching after him as he walked into the garage. A black, rusty Maserati motorcycle was indeed waiting for him, but its engine still seemed intact. "And I am not getting on that! I'll have to... to straddle you! It's inappropriate!"

The soldier raised an eyebrow.

"Don't look at me like that! Having a... a social life is one thing, but I am certainly not engaging in anything of the kind with the likes of you!"

"Pillion or walk," he told her, grabbing a helmet from a hook on the wall and holding it out to her. "Cars are too noticeable."

"So's a man with a bloody metal hand, especially when he's hanging about with someone like me!"

"Fine," the soldier snapped. Something about Mimi tried his usually somewhat level temper. "I'll knock you out and ship you back to your damn father."

"Oh, no you don't, Marlon!"

The soldier hesitated. "What?"

"Marlon," Mimi repeated, her jaw jutted out in defiance. "You know, Marlon Brando? Even if you haven't been in flicks, you look like you have. And you need a name." She sighed, and took the helmet. "This is going to absolutely ruin my hair, you know. Will I be okay in shorts?"

"I don't crash," he said. "Get your stuff."

He dropped his bag in the box mounted on the back of the bike and left it open for Mimi's stuff. He swung his leg over and moment later Mimi got on behind him with barely a grumble. He felt the warmth of her body through the leather of his jacket; she smelled very faintly of expensive rose perfume.

He revved the engine and, with a roar, the bike left the garage in a cloud of sawdust. Mimi gave a shriek as they took of and the pressure of her arms around his torso tripled, but as they got into the open air, the rolling Italian hills, he heard her laugh before the noise was whipped away by the cool early morning wind.

Paris first, the Germans had said, to meet someone called Klein. They would take the fastest route that did not use the autobahns, where they could get pulled over by the Western police, and it was easy for the soldier to figure out what route they would take. So they were probably in a car, since they still had their American cover, and they would stop for the night at about...

There was a small city called Monrais a hundred miles or so past French border that they would probably get to tomorrow evening if they drove without stopping, which they probably would. A small city with small hotels that would not ask questions. The West had little interest in the place, so the Soviets had told him about it; but the Reds also did not care for anywhere west of Berlin, so it was relatively untouched by the two sides of the Cold War - an excellent refuge, then, for these Germans. The soldier could go faster than them on this bike, but Mimi slowed him down. She would insist on resting for at least a few hours, and he could hardly leave her behind.

The westerly foothills of the Alps were covered with small farms, each miles away from the other: he could allow Mimi to sleep in the afternoon, since she had not got any the previous night, and then they could continue to travel under cover of darkness. This way, the owners of the farmhouses would be out in the fields and they would not disturb anyone, if they were careful. It was the last week of summer, the days were long and the harvest was starting to be collected.

The soldier continued onwards until he felt Mimi's arms loosening on his chest from tiredness, about an hour after midday. He braked outside a ramshackle barn with a cottage grafted to one side and his passenger moaned softly.

"I can't feel my thighs," she told him. "Where are we?"

"Lombardy."

Mimi swung one leg over the bike so she was perched sidesaddle and grimaced as she pulled off her delicate shoes. "Ugh. Marlon, look at what you've done to these nylons. I'll never get the mud out of them now," she declared, and hoisted her skirt to fiddle with the clasps of her suspenders. She peeled off the stockings, balled them up and stuck them in the container on the back of the bike. "I'm thirsty."

The cottage might as well have been from a century ago. There was a water pump outside, which Mimi bluntly refused to drink from, and a flagon of warm milk which she sniffed before returning to the cupboard with her mouth twisted downwards in disgust. The red stain had worn away on the inner parts of her lips now, revealing a dusky rose colour. The soldier watched as she reluctantly pumped out some water with manicured fingers and boiled it over the stove.

She did not, he noted, seem to have much problem with breaking and entering. Perhaps she merely thought she was entitled to it all; an odd twist of communist philosophy that meant that, while everything was technically shared, it was all hers anyway. Spoiled little Soviet girls were a fascinating paradox.

Mimi waited for the water to cool impatiently, fiddling with the faded gingham tablecloth as she did. "Why're we stopping?"

"You need sleep," the soldier told her, pulling off his leather jacket. He was not used to the warmth, and the shirt he had stolen stuck uncomfortably to his sweaty skin. Mimi's eyes flicked up and down his torso.

"Please, don't stop on my account," she purred, and the soldier didn't know whether to glare or ignore her. He settled on the latter and gulped down half the lukewarm water. "And don't you need to rest, too?"

Not for another couple of days, at least. He had gone a week in the field without rest before, and there had been no adverse side effects save for a slight headache. "I'll keep watch. The family who lives here'll be back by dusk. Don't use their bed."

"Why not?"

"They'll notice." Beds were the one object the soldier never went near. It was incredibly easy for someone to notice if the place they slept in had been disturbed, and besides, they were part of a world he did not belong to.

"So I just... lie down on the floor? Like some kind of commoner?"

The soldier stared at her. "Your father's one of the most influential communists in the world," he said. "And you talk like a princess."

"Oh, please. Like the Soviet Union's a purely egalitarian society," Mimi scoffed, lifting the tablecloth and draping it around her shoulders. "I'm going to sleep in the barn. The hay might make things more comfortable. Wake me up twenty minutes before we leave, will you?"

The soldier ended up stood in the cool shadows of the barn's entrance, listening to Mimi's soft breathing as she slept. He savoured the lack of her talking and completed an inventory of his weapons, washed the sweat from his shirt and left it to dry in the sun at his feet, repeated everything he knew about the Germans until the information had a familiar shape in his mind, put his shirt back on and found that not yet two hours had passed.

He glanced over at Mimi, who looked younger when she slept. Some of the kohl pencil around the corners of her eyes had smudged, and her hair was escaping its knot; he could count the birthmarks on her pale arms like stars in a city sky. He, HYDRA and the Soviet's greatest weapon, had been sent all the way to Italy to rescue one uppity little girl playing dress-up with the Westerners. Had she been anyone else's daughter, it would have been a complete waste of time. But Ivanov was a name that carried serious weight. What a disappointment this little renegade must be to him.

He shook his head slightly and looked back out at the landscape, the undulating greenery giving way to distant Alps that wore snow like veils. He let his mind turn away from Mimi and forwards - to Monrais, to be precise. It was so peaceful there, so neutral, that they called it Second Switzerland. The perfect place to kill someone and not raise an alarm. And then, once that loose end was tied up and he knew the codes, he could return Mimi to the rendezvous point in Berlin and finally finish this damn mission.

There was a jerry can of fuel in the machinery corner of the barn. The soldier filled the bike's tank and returned his weapons to the box. As he did, his fingers knocked Mimi's bag to one side and its contents spilled out - a kaleidoscope of clothes, practically wrapped around perfume and cosmetic bottles to stop them shattering. This was a woman who was used to travelling, who could pack a little and make it seem like a lot. And, at the bottom, was a little revolver with four bullets inside.

Where had the other bullet ended up, he wondered?

An hour before dusk he shook Mimi awake. She whimpered and flung an arm dramatically over her eyes before sitting up, her white-blonde hair filled with straw. "Already?" she mumbled, and stifled a yawn with the back of her delicate hand.

He left her to wake up properly and took the tablecloth back to the cottage, from which he removed any trace that they had ever been there. The hard-baked clay of the earth meant that the bike's tyres would not leave tracks, which was one small mercy of the heat. The downside was that his arm, which never usually saw daylight, was baking hot enough to burn whenever it touched his skin. He left his leather jacket off so that his arm could cool as the night came in and went to find Mimi, who had managed to remove the hay from her hair and had fixed her make-up back to relative perfection again. "It's gonna get cold," he told her, holding out the jacket.

"Thank you, Marlon." The thing dwarfed the elfin young woman completely, her hands vanishing beneath the cuffs. "What about you?"

"I'm used to cold."

"Ugh. That's one thing I certainly don't miss about Russia. It's lovely and sunny in the west for most of the year - no wonder they have so much more fun. You know, I do believe I caught the sun while I was sleeping in that barn. My forearms are quite brown. This is awful. How does my nose look? Is it red?"

If it had been, he would not have been able to tell because of the powder she was wearing. "Get on the bike," he said, and she heaved a sigh as she climbed on behind him. "They'll be at Monrais. We can get there before sunrise tomorrow if we don't stop."

"I'm hungry."

The soldier responded by kicking up the stand on the bike and tearing out of the farm. He was not hungry. He could not even remember the last time he had eaten.